Theory & History

“The old lie: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” – It is sweet and honourable to die for ones country. This is how Wilfred Owen summed up the attitude of a generation sent to war under the illusion that it would be a short and glorious conflict. Owen himself was one of the last killed in a war that saw an estimated 40 million soldiers and civilians die as a bloody stalemate ensued over four years. Both sides only ever managed to advance of couple of kilometres against their respective enemies.

A new generation of young people, disgusted by the absurd inequality of capitalism, are rallying around socialist ideas. In response, capitalist ideologues have trailed out the same old, tired and baseless slogans to defend their system. But, isn’t capitalism human nature? How often have we heard this? That there is […]

Two hundred years since Karl Marx was born and 170 years since his most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, was published, Eddie McCabe looks at Marx’s theory of class struggle and assesses its relevance for today.

April 2018 marks the one hundredth anniversary of a historic general strike in Ireland. Cillian Gillespie looks at the events of this strike and the revolutionary potential that existed in this movement to unite workers, north and south of the island.

On December 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) announced a new campaign and mass march to shed light on the endemic poverty, inadequate housing, and structural unemployment existing in the middle of the massive postwar economic upswing after World War II.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s last leader, left a truly historical legacy. Aiming to reform bureaucratic rule he helped unleash forces that led to the complete collapse of Stalinism in Russia and eastern Europe. That then fed capitalist globalisation, opening up new markets and cheap labour – and a worldwide propaganda offensive against socialism.

Here we reproduce word-for-word the editorial from the issue of the Socialist (England & Wales) printed on 28 March 2003, the issue of our weekly paper that came out directly after US and UK troops were sent into Iraq. Obviously the Socialist Party could not peer into the future but as you can see we sought to arm our readers with both a perspective of how the processes might develop and with a programme for action to fight to end war.

This year marks the centenary of the first women in Britain and Ireland winning the right to vote in parliamentary elections. The political establishment and right-wing propaganda have been celebrating the introduction of the 1918 Representation of the People Act. But it cannot be forgotten that this Act was a deeply classist compromise, and aimed only to enfranchise a small number of property-owning women from the privileged elite in society, whilst simultaneously ignoring millions of ordinary working-class women.